


Piecing It All Together

by springsdandelion (writergirlie)



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-08
Updated: 2012-04-08
Packaged: 2017-11-03 07:15:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/378736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writergirlie/pseuds/springsdandelion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Sometimes he wondered whether it was the worst thing in the world, not to remember." Peeta will always have pieces of him missing, but he is determined to build new memories that can't be taken away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Piecing It All Together

They asked for stories every night, without fail.

 

Somewhere along the way, he and Katniss had worked out an unspoken arrangement that he would take on the parental duty of bedtime stories. He was the one who was good with words, after all, and bath time had turned into a somewhat laborious affair once the children were old enough to insist that he climb in with them; removing and replacing his artificial leg only stretched out the time unnecessarily and didn’t actually result in them being any cleaner, so it seemed like a natural thing to relegate to his wife.

 

But this— _this_ , he could do. Relished doing it, as a matter of fact. The children seemed to sense this as well, sometimes asking for two stories instead of one, and occasionally even three or four, if they deemed them too short. Peeta knew it was a negotiation tactic of sorts (“Just one more, Daddy, and then we promise, we’ll go to sleep!”) but still, he relented more times than he’d care to admit. As far as parental failings went, he figured this was far less likely to cause any permanent damage down the road, and besides, he’d decided a long time ago—maybe even before they were born, but he couldn’t quite remember—that his own children would never starve for affection.

 

He would do everything in his power see to that.

 

These days, they’d taken to requesting stories of the past. Of his childhood and Katniss’s; how they met and fell in love; where he learned to bake and who had taught her how to hunt, and why Uncle Haymitch sometimes slept for days on end and would greet them with bloodshot eyes whenever he came to visit, though he never did so without bringing with him some sort of a small gift to give to each of them. Peeta knew that one day, they would need to hear the unedited versions of all of these things, the ones that contained the valuable lessons they needed to learn and he never wanted them to forget. But for now, he wanted them to have their innocence while they could still hold on to it, to cling to it until they absolutely had no choice but to let it go.

 

“Tell us about the cakes, Daddy!” the boy implored. He was the one who always made the request—the chattier one of the two, the one who seemed to barrel through life with that same fearlessness he saw in Katniss, while his sister was more thoughtful and deliberate, always catching her parents by surprise with a wisdom far beyond her years. She reminded Peeta a bit of Prim—what he could remember of her, anyway. Or maybe it was a memory he’d absorbed from Katniss.

 

Prim would have reveled in being an aunt, he thought, then he quickly brushed the notion aside before it had a chance to root itself and draw pain up to the surface.

 

“All right, what do you want to know about the cakes?”

 

“What was your favorite one to make?”

 

“Oh that’s easy,” he said, as he tucked his daughter in, smoothing the blankets on either side of her so she was nice and snug. Once the boy was asleep, Peeta would carry him to his own bed, but during story time, his son was content to snuggle next to his sister, riveted by every word and begging Peeta to continue. “The birthday cakes, of course.”

 

“Like the kind you make for me and Hope?”

 

The truth was, he couldn’t really remember what kind he made back then. Images, shiny and dull alike, tangled together in his brain cells—bright, colorful confections with exceptional detail stenciled into them: feathers on birds, petals on flowers, the varying shades of blue of the ocean waves. Katniss once told him that she would often bring Prim around to the bakery window to admire his handiwork, that there was so little of true beauty in the grimness of the old District 12 that she couldn’t deny her sister what rare chances there were to glimpse it, and for a fraction of a second, he thought, _Yes…_ _real. Definitely real._

 

But just before he was about to tell his children this, he realized he was actually thinking of the birthday cakes he’d made for them, and once again he felt that familiar punch in his stomach. Once again, he had to cover up by making up a new memory on the spot.

 

They fell asleep after the second story tonight, content with the first and so tired from running around with Haymitch’s geese that afternoon that they barely made it past the opening minute of the second. Peeta moved the boy to his own room and kissed him on the forehead before slipping into bed with Katniss. She was already asleep, but woke when he climbed in, turning over to face him and giving him a smile, holding her hand out to him.

 

“Did they stall much?” she said.

 

Peeta shook his head. “Nah. Couldn’t keep their eyes open, actually.”

 

She chuckled and scooted closer to him, her head pillowed on his arm, her hand finding its usual spot on his breastbone. He tilted his head slightly to kiss the top of her head, then let his head fall back against the pillow, staring at the shadows in the ceiling, willing them to form images he might recognize.

 

“Katniss?”

 

“Hmm?” came the sleepy reply.

 

“What kind of cakes did we used to have in the bakery window?”

 

“All kinds of different ones,” she said. “You were known for your wedding cakes. Like the kind you made for Finnick and Annie, although I think by then you’d picked up a few tips from the bakers in the Capitol…”

 

“Oh,” he said simply.

 

He heard a shuffling, and after a few seconds, he felt her lift her head up, felt the weight of her stare in the semi-darkness, though she didn’t say anything. He slipped his other arm beneath his head, still staring at the ceiling. Still avoiding her eyes.

 

“I just thought… I figured birthday cakes would have been my specialty.”

 

She didn’t answer right away, but reached up to brush a lock of hair from his forehead.

 

“They were,” she said. “But you told me that you didn’t want to bake them for just anybody. You’d make them for your family, or your friends, but you didn’t want them up for display because they were your way of showing someone how much you cared about them.”

 

He closed his eyes and tried to think back to that time, weeding out the shiny, overly vibrant memories that were fighting to overtake the dimmer ones. Katniss was right. He remembered now. All of those cakes he’d make for his father, his brothers, his mother. It was the one time of the year when his mother would look at him with pride, rather than the barely disguised derision he was so used to seeing.

 

“Right,” he said. “That’s right…”

 

Sometimes he wondered whether it was the worst thing in the world, not to remember. Sometimes it felt more like a blessing than a curse, like a chance to wipe clean all of the hurts of the past, the ones that he might have struggled to forgive, if he had to live with their weight. But most of the time, it felt like losing something that he couldn’t remember even having. An emptiness with no owner.

 

He brought his hand up to stroke his wife’s hair, sliding it down to wrap around the nape of her neck and pulling her into him for a kiss. He would remember this, though. He would file it away with all of the memories he trusted, the ones no one would ever be able to defile again.

 

And they would be enough to sustain him.

 

 


End file.
